Repeatedly, he argued that the Church's purpose was more to proclaim God's merciful love for all people than to condemn sinners for having fallen short of strictures, especially those having to do with gender and sexual orientation.
The biblical authors look upon the national fortunes of Israel as revelations of God's merciful love, his fidelity to his promises, his unfailing power, his exacting justice, and his readiness to forgive the penitent sinner.
With three encyclicals, three major books, more than a thousand addresses and more than 20 international trips over the last seven years, he has tirelessly preached the good news of God's merciful love to all who have ears to hear, challenging us to embrace that love with all of its demands, and to witness it with our lives.
How could a teaching inspired by God's merciful love provoke scores of children to be abused and abandoned?
Is it not at the very heart of Christ's message that God's love for us is the steadfast, unfailing, merciful love of a parent?
Officially it considers same-sex unions "an error," but Pope Francis said last month that lawmakers "should never forget the necessary, merciful love towards people who, as a free choice or as a result of unlucky life circumstances, live" in that state of error.
I hope that if you listened to our youths with compassion, you might share my horror at how the message of God's merciful love in the Gospels has been deformed by religious hostility towards LGBT people, a hostility which destroys the bonds between so many parents and their LGBT children.
Is he merciful, just, loving, vengeful, jealous?
Pope Francis did not call this synod to change teaching, but to expand it to include the missing part: the "missionary" and "pastoral" dimension – the merciful, healing, loving, welcoming part of Catholicism, which those outside the faith don't get to see.
Does Francis's explicitly Christian message of a loving merciful God survive, even in the secular age, as an inchoate symbol of the human longing for transcendence?
